What You Should Know About Majoring In The Minor Things

When it comes to your life, your business, or even your goals, there are so many things that pop up, calling for your attention. You get sidetrack from the major objective so many times, it prolongs the overall time it takes to get the objective done and makes the road much more difficult to traverse. If you have experienced this a couple times in your life, then here is what you should know about majoring in the minor things…

The Minors In The Park

When you have an objective or goal and you have set your intention, on the road to completion you will have minor events or things that will call for your attention. The thing about the minors, they seem important at the time—or at least important enough to grab your attention—but in the grand scheme of things, you will see that they are really inconsequential.

A simplified example would be you have an objective to get from point A to point B, inside a public park, as quickly as you can. During your travels, you come across a lady in front of you, continually stopping her stroller to check on the baby inside. She’s slowing your progress of taking a straight path to point B, but instead of simply going around her, you stop behind her each time wondering what is so important that she must continue to stop and check on her baby.

You begin to run through all the reasons for her actions in your head, until you come to the point where you have to ask her to explain why she is doing what she is doing. She gives you a full explanation which takes about 5 minutes and afterwards, she recommends that you go in front of her.

Now being 5+ minutes off track, you continue to run to Point B only to have a family of ducks cross your path. Once again, instead of finding an opening to go around, you sit and wonder how many there are and where exactly are they going.

Real Life Minors

The example may seem pretty silly but that’s what most people do when it comes to their own lives. Instead of keeping focus on the major objective, they major in the minors.

It’s the guy who is trying to complete a task at work but “has to” respond to this email that just came in; taking his attention and energy off his task and giving it to something that could actually wait until he is done.

It’s the athlete who practices on bettering his game but keeps on allowing his focus to be sidetracked to his teammates, wondering—and I mean truly trying to find an answer—why they are having trouble in certain areas of their game. By doing this, he retards his own progress.

It’s the salesman who know the numbers game but slows down from going through the number because she wants to know why some do and some don’t. As Jim Rohn said, “I wouldn’t sign up for that class.”

The minors can also leave you feeling anxious day in and day out. The worries of what someone else close to you is doing or not doing. Micromanaging keeps you preoccupied with everyone else around you. Focussing on so many minors around you could leave you with never finding a true space for peace in your own life because there’s always small worries tugging at your attention.

Give too much focus to the minors and you will find yourself occupied with things that don’t advance you to your goals, nor lead you to a happy life. It takes up to much real estate in your mind, leaving you forgetting the full picture, getting lost in the field of endless small worries and events.